Github gets $100m from Andreessen Horowitz – what’s in store?

Huge news for the social network for developers, after raising $100m in funding from rockstar angel investors Andreessen Horowitz, giving it a whopping market value of $750m.

GitHub, the “social network for developers”, has raised $100m in
funding from rockstar angel investors Andreessen Horowitz, giving
it a whopping market value of $750m. Could this be the year where
Git finally knocks Subversion off its perch? This move suggest very
possibly

Since its founding in 2008, the site has quickly become the
de-facto place for developers to share open-source code,
and“fork me on
github” banners have become increasingly ubiquitous.
Having quickly started making a profit soon after being
established, however, GitHub has never needed to search for
investment.

So what’s changed? According to a blog
post by cofounder Tom Preston-Werner, the investment is
more of a corporate team-up than a buy-out:

Over the past few months we’ve gotten to know Marc [Andreessen,
of Andreessen Horowitz] and one of his partners, Peter Levine, and
we really like them. We wish we could hire them both, but they
already have jobs. So instead we’re going to work with them through
their firm.

Andreessen Horowitz is a
venture capital company founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben
Horowitz, who have invested in some of the trendiest (and most
successful) technology startups of the past few years, including
Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Digg, Skype, Groupon, Instagram,
Pinterest and Zynga.

However, Andreessen Horowitz’s $100m investment in GitHub is the
largest the company has ever given out. From a certain perspective
GitHub seems a strange property to choose to invest in: only four
years old, with just over one million
members and a limited niche audience. But it has also
proven itself to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, and to have a
sustainable business model already – more than which can be said
about many other Andreessen Horowitz investments.

The big question is: what are GitHub planning on doing with all
this cash? Expansion, says Preston-Werner:

We want GitHub to be even easier for beginners and more powerful
for experts. We want GitHub everywhere—whether you use Windows or
Mac or Linux or some futuristic computer phone that hasn’t been
invented yet—we want GitHub to be an awesome experience. We want to
make it easier to work together than alone. We want to keep
changing the way software is developed for the better by making
collaborating easier and sharing a no-brainer.

Exciting, if vague, stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing what
GitHub has in store – particularly in opening up the world of
coding and open-source development to beginners.